In August, the ecosystem introduced the first on-chain market for Nvidia H100 GPU rental rates, letting traders and AI infrastructure players hedge or speculate on the cost of high-end compute hardware using a decentralized oracle feed and a perpetual derivative market. Instead of just trading “AI narrative” tokens, Injective users can literally trade the rental price of Nvidia GPUs that power AI clusters in the real world. That’s a glimpse of what a mature onchain derivatives stack looks like: not simply mirroring centralized exchanges, but listing new primitives that only make sense when you combine DeFi rails with live real-world data.
On the private markets side, Injective has leaned into a deep integration with Republic, the global investment platform that has facilitated more than $3 billion in funding for thousands of deals. The partnership includes native Injective support in Republic Wallet for millions of users across 150+ countries, a dedicated launchpad for Injective projects, and a tokenization pipeline for “mirror tokens” that track the economic exposure of private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and others. Building on this, Injective launched onchain Pre-IPO perpetual markets, starting with OpenAI and expanding to other high-profile private firms, letting traders access leveraged exposure to the implied valuations of companies that have never listed on a stock exchange. That’s not a far-off theoretical vision; it’s a live product category where volumes are already crossing into the billions.
All of this RWA and Pre-IPO activity flows back to the core token. INJ doesn’t just sit as a governance coin in the background. It secures the network through staking, where yields have attracted not only retail stakers but also institutional treasury allocators. In September and October, Pineapple Financial, a New York Stock Exchange–listed fintech company, announced and began deploying a $100 million Injective Digital Asset Treasury anchored in $INJ, becoming the first publicly traded firm to hold INJ on its balance sheet. Pineapple’s initial $8.9 million purchase of roughly 678,000 INJ marked the start of that strategy, with staking yields and potential tokenization rails cited as key reasons. A separate deal with Crypto.com added institutional custody and staking infrastructure for this treasury, underlining that this is not just a speculative punt but a structured, long-term treasury allocation.
Alongside direct treasury demand, Injective has a deflationary design built around burn auctions. A share of fees generated by dApps in the ecosystem is regularly converted into INJ and burned via auctions, meaning that more network usage directly translates into buy pressure and reduced circulating supply over time. When you combine that with staking and wrapped INJ in MultiVM environments, you end up with a token that is deeply baked into the network’s economics rather than sitting as a passive “governance only” asset.
The institutional side of the INJ story doesn’t stop at treasuries. In mid-2025, Canary Capital filed for a US-listed Staked INJ ETF with the SEC, structured to give investors exposure to the price of $INJ plus staking rewards via a regulated vehicle. Canary had previously created a Delaware trust entity as the foundation for this product, mirroring the playbook used for other spot crypto ETFs. Since then, US regulators have rolled out a more streamlined process for listing certain crypto and commodity ETFs, and Canary has moved ahead with other altcoin products under the same framework. For Injective, that puts $INJ in a small club of non-BTC, non-ETH assets with an active ETF pipeline in the US. The line between “onchain finance” and “Wall Street product” is getting thinner.
In parallel, Injective continues to strengthen what you could call its “institutional DeFi rails” Partnerships with data providers, custody platforms and infrastructure companies are turning the chain into something that feels familiar to professional market participants while retaining the permissionless, composable nature of public blockchains. On the ecosystem page you already see names like Coinbase Institutional, Google Cloud, Agora, Republic and other serious players sitting alongside native DeFi protocols, trading venues and infrastructure teams. For institutions, it’s easier to justify a move into DeFi when there are direct connections to partners they already know.
From a trader’s perspective, all of this activity – native EVM, MultiVM token standard, RWA derivatives, Pre-IPO markets, Pineapple’s $100M treasury, the Canary Staked INJ ETF, GPU rental perps – converges into a simple reality: Injective is one of the few places where you can express complex macro and micro views entirely onchain, with low latency, high leverage where appropriate, and a token model that directly ties usage to value accrual. If you are bullish on tokenized capital markets, $INJ becomes more than a pure speculative bet; it becomes a way to own a slice of the infrastructure layer where that transition is actually happening.
